Partner Spotlight: Hearing Youth Voices and the “Schools that Work for Us” Framework
CYCLE partners with communities and school districts looking to build collective power through grassroots leadership, organizing, advocacy, and relationship building. It is important to our team to center and prioritize the experiences and expertise of people most negatively impacted by racial, cultural, and class-based hierarchies. To that end, we work in solidarity with dozens of community and school partners. One of those partners, Hearing Youth Voices, a youth-led social justice organization in New London, Connecticut, last summer invented the "Schools that Work for Us" framework for thinking comprehensively about school transformation and what needs to be taken down and what needs to be (re)built in order for schools to be sites of true growth, development, and freedom for Black and Brown young people.. For this month’s CYCLE blog post, we are pleased to feature a guest commentary on the framework from the Hearing Youth Voices team.
Hearing Youth Voices Performing at CYCLE’s 2019 Youth Leadership Institute
What is Schools that Work for Us?
It is a framework for thinking comprehensively about school transformation and what needs to be taken down and what needs to be (re)built in order for schools to be sites of true growth, development, and freedom for Black and Brown young people. These themes were developed in 2018 when young people compiled six years of Hearing Youth Voices research and data that had been collected via surveys, interviews, and hundreds of youth meetings since 2012. We then organized the issue areas into categories and came up with eight themes -- the struggle; resources; mental health; freedom to be and to move; full safety; teaching and learning; relationships; and collective power.
From there, we launched a community series in which we shared the Schools that Work for Us framework with more than 150 people to get feedback and more ideas – check out a short video of a performance that youth did in June to present the framework to the world! We also talked to young people across the state to “test” the framework and see if it reflected their experiences. We found that it overwhelmingly did; although the framework was originally developed in New London, its relevancy extends across the state.
The framework is important to us because it provides a road map to our work as we move forward. Some people have asked, “What next?” Schools that Work for Us is, at its core, a long-term policy agenda that we intend to chip away at for as long as it takes. We will continue to run youth-led campaigns on each of the issues named in the report until we achieve them all.
The inventors of the Schools that Work for Us framework and the authors of the report are: Andhrose Bazil, Taylin Santiago, Aaliyah Figueroa, Twok Burrel, Eliza Brown, Zeraiah Ramos, Shane Brooks Fletcher, Shawn Brooks Fletcher, Azzure Brown, Tareonna Alger Rodriguez, Mariana Fermin, Shaneva Edwards, Shykarah Fareus & Adult staff Yanitza Cubilette, Maya Sheppard, chelsea cleveland, & Laura Burfoot.
Interested in the Schools that Work for Us framework? Want us to come and present at your school or organization? Contact us!
Do you have exciting news or work to share? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at cycle@rwu.edu if you would like to discuss a feature blogpost to highlight your work!